Decolonization, democratization, and communist reform: The Soviet collapse in comparative perspective

This article seeks to situate the collapse of the Soviet Union in a set of broader comparative contexts, each of which illuminates particular aspects of late Soviet history. It treats that history first as an end-of-empire story, comparing it with other disintegrating empires of the twentieth century, then as a democratization narrative juxtaposed to those of other authoritarian regimes in southern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and east Asia over the past three decades, and finally as a communist reform process gone awry, comparing it to an analogous and apparently more successful process in China.